December 12, 2012

Facebook Vacation

I've confirmed that today's Facebook's privacy changes allow strangers to see everything in your timeline if they search for you by name.

I was annoyed but putting up with the reality that people could tag me in photos or posts without my consent and it was up to me to delete the tags. Essentially, this meant I had extra work -- I had to regularly login and confirm that everything where I was tagged was something I wanted everyone to know about me. If I didn't regularly login, someone could tag me and it could stay up, visible on my timeline for my entire network until I finally got around to taking it down.

But, before today, I was one of the (apparently very few) users who hid their entire Timeline from search. As of today, that feature is now gone. So, I had to go through my entire timeline and "hide" the things I did not want viewable by strangers in connection with my name. Mind you, I'd already done this by "hiding" my entire timeline. Again, like publication of tags of my facebook profile without my consent, the publication of the timeline to anyone who searched for me by name caused me extra work.

I'm guessing the day is soon coming when facebook will cater solely to people who do not share my privacy concerns. At that point, even if I'm willing to do all the work, the features I want just may not be available.

So, I'm taking the rest of the year as a facebook holiday to evaluate my options for (a) how much I actually miss facebook; and (b) if I miss it enough, how to address this issue in 2013.

My rule of thumb is to pretend that the so-called privacy settings don't exist, and only post what I am comfortable with the whole world knowing. But you're right in that it is shocking and annoying to be tagged by others. Fortunately, I have few enough "friends" that this happens only rarely, and in situations that I don't like, even rarer still.

@Cathy -- the friend graph and phototagging and posttagging on facebook make it a fundamentally different collection of information than twitter, for me. The majority of my facebook network are not in my twitter network and vice versa.